Founders love to dismiss brand as a fluffy, unquantifiable thing floating in the sky, then pour every euro into paid acquisition and ride what Angeley Mullins calls the roller coaster of death: spend hard, panic when the ICPs don't show, kill everything, repeat. The trouble is that most buying now happens before a prospect ever reaches your sales team, and if nobody knows who you are, that pipeline leaks as fast as you fill it.
Mullins makes the case that brand is fundamentally a feeling, and that building it is the foundation of customer acquisition and retention rather than an afterthought. Drawing on examples from Starbucks Reserve's eighty-dollar coffee to Old Spice's realisation that women were buying the product, and Nike's Kaepernick campaign, she shows how brand commands premium pricing and drives measurable revenue lifts. She also looks at what AI changes and doesn't: content is still king for how these tools surface you, but no model has yet managed to replicate a genuine feeling.
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All right. So good afternoon, everybody. I know we had lunch, and it's a dark room. So we're kind of sleepy, but we're going to pump everybody up, because today we're going to talk about the fun stuff, which is brand. And this is one of my most favorite topics.
Just to get an idea of people in the room, how many are founders? Founders, raise your hands. Okay, investors? Investors don't want to raise their hands. Okay, over there. Operators. Some. Okay, great. Okay. So hopefully this will go for everyone. Because people always tell me, Angelie, brand, it's this like magic fluffy topic in the sky, and we can't relate it to revenue.
So, here's your chance. Here we go. Brand is a revenue driver. A little bit about myself, and I put up a couple QR codes throughout the presentation. If you need the presentation, I can connect. But I originally come from the States, this is where you hear my accent, from sunny San Diego.
Have lived and worked all over the world, and have scaled three big tech companies and three scale ups. We won't get all into it now, but most recently, did a thirty six million Euro Series B, and a fourteen million Euro Series A. So I do know what it's like to go through the fundraising process, and how you basically correlate brand to revenue.
Also startup advisor, mentor, and a very much prominent advocate of women in tech. So for all the women in the room as well. Alright, brand is about a feeling. Everybody says, is it a campaign? Is it an image? No, it's a feeling. What does that mean?
Let's go through some of my favorite examples. Who likes Spotify? Who has a Spotify account, listens to Spotify? So, when the only angel you're looking for is an investor, there's a playlist for that. Very, very nice. Next one, Shopify. Is there any Shopify users in here? A few?
I don't know if you guys saw this campaign. So your mom should be your first customer, not your only customer. Very exciting, that feeling that you get. The next one, TikTok. Love it or hate it, TikTok is here. This was some of the original campaigns.
I don't know if you guys saw when people were just dancing and doing these crazy videos. And then you get into the crazy PR. Who saw the congressional debate in the US Congress grilling the TikTok CEO and they didn't know what the hell algorithm was?
Did anyone see that one? Okay. So this brand will continue to live in infamy, An amazing brand, whether you love it or hate it. The next one, who knows what this shoe is? What is it? New New Okay. So you've seen it worn by everyone.
So the feeling that you get, right? Worn by supermodels in London and dads in Ohio. Just the same all around because it's that everyday feeling that you get. This is one of my favorite ads. Not because I wear makeup, I actually don't. But L'Oreal, this ad, all the men in your room, raise your hand.
All the men, all the men, okay, this ad is for you. Hire more women in leadership roles, we're all worth it. Profitability goes up fifteen percent. Really interesting ad campaign. So again, it's about a feeling. One of my most favorite ads, who knows this one?
Super famous, buy Nike. What's his name? Okay, so everybody knows the story. If you don't, basically American football took the knee, basically protesting, got canned, fired, whatever word you want to use, nobody wanted to hire him. Then Nike picks him up. They have a campaign, find your greatness.
Right? And they have this campaign, sacrificing everything. It's worth it. So for all the founders in the room can definitely identify with that feeling. And we're going to come back to this towards the end. So the whole idea is brands about a feeling.
We're gonna do a quick usability study because it's tech and I think that we should. So we have my favorite fairy godmother, Itur over there that has a mic. I'd like to know people's favorite brands. Who's got a favorite brand? Okay, all the way over here.
We're gonna do some sprinting, but still. And it's a very cool usability study because we're gonna see at the end what we get. But you can shout out the name while she's coming over. What is it, Vinted? Okay. Think she's up there and to the right.
And Vinted, they're out of Lithuania, right? Hello. Hello. Vintage. Okay, and what is the, thank you. All right, and what's the feeling that you get when you think about Vinted? Sustainability. Doing good, making money. Do you remember any of their product promotions? No. Exactly, okay.
Who has another favorite brand? Over to the left. Oh, LEGO, and it makes me feel joyous and joyful. Really nice. I've never actually been to one of the Lego, I think they have Lego land, the whole thing, but very joyous. Do you remember any of their product promotions? No.
Okay. This usability study is starting to take wings. So who else has a favorite brand? Maybe someone over on this side of the room. Sorry, Tori, to make you run And you guys can do this at home by the way. You write down your top ten favorite brands RM Williams.
Which one? RM Williams. Okay. And tell me what the feeling it is that you get. It's an Australian shoe brand and it represents traditional craftsmanship. Okay, and do you remember any of their product promotions? Some of them, yeah. Okay, what's the favorite one?
Fifty percent discount. Okay, we love that discount. There we go, we love that discount. Okay, we're gonna do one more. Does anyone have one more favorite brand? All okay, two. Okay, we'll go down here. And then maybe we'll take you at the end as well, so I haven't forgotten you.
And thank you Itur, so fabulous for Thank you. Jeju Bakes, it's my local bakery. Yes. Yeah. They're amazing. What's this feeling that you get? Curiosity, they always have really good flavors, highly recommend their date and rose fall a day. It's incredible. Very nice. All right.
And do you remember any of their product promotions or anything? No. All right. Thank you for that. And so, it's about the feeling that you get. And that's the most important thing. Because I get lots of founders asking me, this brand, how do you create it?
And I have to do this promotion, and I have to do fifty percent off. Or I have to do this really great software product feature list. That is not what it's about. All right, what do most scale ups do? Who is running, investing, or working for a scale up?
So pre seed to series B. Raise your hand, scale ups. Okay, what do most scale up companies do? This is what I call the roller coaster of death. Rightly so named, because what usually happens in your customer acquisition strategies is they don't look at brand at all.
This comes from an article that I wrote for a group called CMO Alliance. And what happens? We have some money. This is how it usually goes. Your founder or your founding teams, we have some money. We want to put it basically towards customer acquisition.
Paid acquisition, paid marketing, go, go, go. Right? Then you get to the top of it, and then you're like, oh my gosh, we're not getting our ICPs, or we don't know who our ICP is, or we didn't do the proper product market fit research.
Kill everything. How many of you have been in situations where somebody has said, okay, stop all spend and just stop. And then what happens? Okay, let's do some more research, and then you keep going, you keep going, you keep going. So this is why I call it the roller coaster of death.
What should we be doing? So this is the long and short term demand generation mix. So over here, you have this brand building. And this is one of the reasons that I hear founders and operators say, we don't want to focus on brand building at the beginning.
Why? Because it costs all this money, and we can't quantify it. But if you don't do it, it will never give back. And what I call brand building is the gift that keeps giving over and over again. Which brings me into this quote.
Brand building should be the essence of your growth strategy. It's the foundation of your customer acquisition and retention strategy. It's the one lever that all scale up companies should focus on first. However, don't usually look at until their performance marketing strategies fail. So this usually goes after, I'll say roller coaster dive number two.
Then founders and original scale up operators are starting to look at this and they'll say, oh my gosh, what's my ICP again? And oh my gosh, what do they care about? And what's the feeling? Only then do they start doing this. So the big question, does brand equal revenue?
Let's find out. Who here is doing b2b? Any b2b people in the room? Okay, you're gonna love this. All right. So LinkedIn did a survey, I think it's a year old now, but it still holds true. It's from twenty twenty four. They did a survey of all marketing leaders across the world.
What do they spend money on? Right? Because what you spend money on, you equate to what you value. Look at this. Who's done account based marketing? Account based marketing people in the room? Guess where this landed? Number four, very interesting, especially if you sell to enterprise.
First is lead gen, then here you go. Number two, brand building. If you start looking in marketing magazines, like Marketing Week, Advertising Age, etc, you're going to see that companies large and small are starting to intensely increase their brand spend. Why? Because they're finding that they're getting something back from it.
Third thing, demand gen. But yeah, fourth is account based marketing. And the reason I point this out is because especially in the B2B SaaS space, I hear account based marketing all the time. Not that it's not good, not that it doesn't work, but that you need a foundation to build it from.
All right, this graph. So the dark blue is the amount of money in percentage that b to b marketing leaders are spending on new customer acquisition. And the light blue is returning customers. So you have it here on the left allocated by industry, and then on the right hand side allocated by region.
Anyone have an idea on why so much money is going into new client acquisition besides the obvious that you need to sell? Any ideas? So if we keep putting something into a funnel, and it keeps churning out, we have to do what? Put more money back into a funnel.
So this is the reason it's a very, very cool graph, because it shows that putting more money in is good, but it's not the only thing. And again, this is for paid marketing demand gen. So what's the problem? Eighty percent. Any idea what this number means?
What's the eighty percent? Almost, but think about it the opposite way. It's the percentage of money that is not being allocated to brand. I'm going to go back in some slides. Think about it again. The eighty percent is the percent of money that's not being allocated into brand.
And now make this connection here on this slide, all this money that's being pumped into new client acquisition. There's no brand, people don't know who you are. If you happen to have an SDR, they're doing their HubSpot or Salesforce sequences. You might get somebody on a video call and guess what?
Who are you? What do you do? Or let's say you don't have a content marketing engine. They're googling you, have no idea. So this is why things like this are extremely important. It's not going there and it needs to. Alright, the sales funnel, my favorite piece.
Everybody's heard the quote, and I think I have it on the next slide. What percentage of sales is done before it even hits your sales team? Any idea? More than half. Seventy percent of your sales is done before it even hits your sales team.
So you guys can look at the seller focus piece. And I would call this is the old model. Now we have with AI tools, GTM engineers, but in the old model, you would prospect for leads, they would go through all the nurturing funnels, you still do that.
But now it's a buyer focused funnel. The very first thing on the top is brand promise. It's not what your offer is. It's not what your product features are. Who has seen in a SaaS platform what I call the chart of death? My software is better than my competitor's software.
And here's the magic chart of all the features. And you guys have seen the check boxes on the chart, you know exactly what I'm saying. How does that make any sense? What that does is it is a feature war to the bottom. And if you try to do it on price, it's a price war to the bottom.
That's why in sales methodology, we had something called value based selling, which everybody knows about. But the important thing to understand is in this new sales funnel, brand promise is at the top. Alright, so there's the quote. Seventy percent happens before you even speak to sales.
Let's go into my favorite example. Who likes and hates Starbucks? Everybody here? All right. Where did the Starbucks brand come from? So you see the woman in the mermaid. Say again? Seattle. It came from Seattle, the city. But where does the brand come from?
What's the story behind it? Does anybody know? Has anybody read a book called Moby ****? And what was the first mate? Starbuck was the first mate. So think about that. There's always a story, that goes behind it. But the essence of this slide in brand who's had a bad cup of coffee?
Okay. Most of us. Who's gone to Starbucks and had a bad cup of coffee? Most of us. And I think this five dollars or whichever currency you want to buy your coffee in, this is years ago. But Starbucks still commands. Every year comes out the pumpkin spice latte.
I think now they have the lavender matcha thing going along. And they're able to charge insane prices because of the brand. Who knows what this is? Shout it out. Who has an idea what this is? A Starbucks Reserve. Where is it? Milan. Think about this everyone.
Starbucks went to Italy, okay, home of coffee, to open up a reserve coffee store, and they think they can compete. But they did, and they're winning. Why is that? Let's take a look inside. Has anyone been to a Starbucks Reserve? Starbucks Reserve? Seattle, Milan, Shanghai? I went to the one in Shanghai.
It is phenomenal. It is a glorious brand experience. You can see how the coffee is roasted. You can see how it smells. They have awesome little coffee experiments, all the while while they're selling you their coffee. This is a bag of Starbucks Reserve Roasted Coffee.
Any idea how much it costs? Shout it out. How much does it cost? Keep going. Eighty bucks a bag. So for those of you that think that brand does not drive revenue, I'm here to tell you, it is. Now, we're at a tech conference and you guys are thinking, yeah, these are great, you know, ecommerce examples, CPG examples. I run a software company.
I'm in tech. What does that have to do about me? Let's take a look. This is an inter brand study. I think it's a few years old, but it still holds true. The top companies and the top brands, not only by spend, but by awareness, and they have brand tracking studies to measure this.
So I want you to take a look at this. What is the similarity that you guys see in this list? What's more of the common denominator? There you go. Tech company, tech company, tech company, tech company. Starbucks, the example that I just showed you guys, with their eighty dollar brand of coffee, they came out at number forty eight.
So just so you know, tech is learning from ecommerce, tech is learning from d to c, and b to b, especially in tech, is also learning. And they are coming up, and they are realizing that brand is driving value. So super important. Alright.
What's the average increase in revenue when you start to use brand to generate revenue? Any ideas? Average increase in revenue from a sale. Almost right there, thirty three. Really great. Thirty three percent average increase in revenue. So for the founders in the room that maybe think, I don't know if I should try it, think it's really expensive, I'm just going to go for performance marketing first, I would definitely beg to differ.
Thirty three percent increase. All right. We're in the era of AI. Everybody's talking about AI, so let's talk about it. Who uses all these tools? I'm sure we all do. Here's an interesting thing. I'm looking at brand in the era of these AI GPTs, and I'm looking at it in terms of what does it actually pull up.
What I did for myself was a little usability study. I said, okay, chat GPT and Perplexity and Claude. Write me a bio about Angelie Mullins. You guys can do this at home as well. And just ask it. Write a bio about your name.
Look at the results. When I did this for myself, all the results were completely different and had completely different information. Then what did I do? Look at the sources. You know, the sources are still pulling from high ranking websites. What does that tell you?
Number one, content is still king. So if anyone was doubting that in the era of AI, content is still king. And number two, I'm waiting for GPTs, if it happens, to start selling and advertising and ranking inside of the GPTs. So if you ask what's the best restaurant?
If you ask what's the best software? How's it gonna pull it? Whoever just has the most content? Are we gonna get to a point where we're paying? That's an open question, but still. All right. How many AI tools do you need? Very interesting question.
I know in the era of AI, there's an AI tool for everything. Now it will continue to grow. These are the AI tools just for content, just to put out content. This is not everything in the list, just for content. Very, very interesting.
Can AI replicate a feeling? We talked about brand being a feeling. It doesn't matter how good your video is. It doesn't matter what comes up in the GPT search results. It doesn't matter if Perplexity or Claude can write ten different product marketing statements for you.
Can AI replicate a feeling? Has anyone been able to see AI do this yet? Have they been the mastermind behind any kind of campaign or any kind of connected feeling? It'd be interesting to see if that happens in future. Alright, on to my favorite case study.
For all the men in the room, raise your hands again. Men, sorry to pick on you. All right, this case study is actually not for you. Even though Old Spice is a men's deodorant, and I'm using this case study because it is, even though it is a CPG product, it is one of the single best examples of making sure you have your product market fit, making sure you understand who is actually buying your product, and making sure that you have your brand right with a feeling that there is.
It is one of the most iconic. You can Google it later. There are tons of reports done on this. So that's why I chose it. All right. What happened to Old Spice? Does anyone even wear Old Spice anymore? Okay. What happened to Old Spice?
They were losing to competitors. Their brand didn't resonate. Of course, they had ads like this, so you think you'd need to be a few hundred years old, in order to use it. And clearly, the company didn't understand who their ICP was. They kept targeting this towards men. It wasn't working.
Okay? This one, think they skipped the slides, but we'll keep going. I think they skipped the slides in the order. Alright. The solution. So who has seen this campaign? What your man can smell like. The reason they put together this campaign is because they found in their research, sixty percent of the buyers were women.
The women were buying the men's deodorant. It was really interesting. So they were like, how do we go after the women? They took this guide, they threw this campaign up, and it was gangbusters. The result, traffic increased three hundred percent. Number one, at its peak, the most viewed sponsored YouTube channel, the video, forty million views.
Twitter now x, the followings increased two thousand seven hundred percent. That's hard to do. Sales increased by a hundred and twenty five percent. ROI, nearly infinity. This is a master class in branding, reaching your ICP, telling a story, and making sure, for heaven's sakes, that you're targeting the right audience.
Alright. Does brand matter? We're going to go back to this guy, Colin Kaepernick. So when Nike decided to do this ad with him, literally the world was calling him crazy. I think Trump, I don't know if the actual quote is on here, but, you know, there he is, President Trump.
What was Nike thinking? What were they doing, this guy? Nobody wanted to back him. But if you guys have seen the ad in the campaign, if you guys kind of sung the brand ethos, Nike doesn't sell a shoe. They don't position it to you. Here's the rubber.
Here's all the cool materials. Does anyone know what one of their best selling brand campaigns is? What's the slogan? Just do it. What's the second one? Find your greatness. If you go to YouTube and you look, you will see ads of people who are literally running, you know, and just one person on a pavement.
And they're talking about all the hurdles that they had to overcome. It's about that inner feeling. So again, this Dream Crazy campaign, you guys can look it up, powerful, powerful video. They didn't talk about the Nike shoe. None of that. They talked about believing in yourself when everyone else was against you.
So what did it do for them? Because that's the revenue piece. Massive. So this is a clip of an ad. Nike sales booming after the ad, invalidating all the critics that were naysaying. Thirty one percent increase in sales. So remember Nike sells gazillions.
So eight hundred and forty seven million in that year, seven point two percent increase in their stock price. That's massive. Six billion in brand value. Brand value is basically how much it would take to push that out into the universe. And one hundred and sixty three million in earned media.
That's how much you would have to actually buy. So a massive, massive amount. Alright, when you go to software, because I showed a lot of ecommerce classic ads that you guys could see. But when it comes to software, an interesting company that's doing some things, Snowflake, Hootsuite, they have one.
Basically, work from anywhere campaign that's B2B, really interesting one. Duolingo. These are all examples of software companies that are doing amazing things with brand. So with that said, thank you very much. Hope you learned some stuff about brand.
